First bill after city water lease confusing for some

Next bills from Lehigh County Authority will be back on cycle.

Some Allentown residents found their first water bills from Lehigh County… (Paul Muschick / The Morning…)

January 04, 2014|Paul Muschick | The Watchdog

The lease of Allentown's water and sewer systems was supposed to be seamless from the customers' perspective. Everything would be the same except who billed them. They'd now be paying the Lehigh County Authority, which leased the systems from the city.

But some customers noticed a difference, a big one, when they got their first bills from the authority late last year.

Their bills were higher than usual, and there was no apparent reason why.

Sandra Mann's first bill from the authority, due last month, showed she had used 27,300 gallons of water. Her previous four bills from the city hadn't topped 11,900 gallons.

"Seems rather large to me," Mann told me in an email. "I don't see how I had such a large jump in usage."

Stefan Goslawski told me he, too, doubted the accuracy of his bill that was due last month. It showed he had used 7,339 gallons of water, which was 3,180 gallons more than during the previous billing period when the city ran the system.

I also learned the authority hadn't done a good job of explaining to its new customers that their first bills might be smaller or larger than normal due to the transition. If yours was out of line, that's why.

And because the bills didn't include all of the information customers would have needed to figure that out themselves, there was needless confusion and concern.

When the authority sends customers their second bills, some of which went out late last month, they'll be back on normal three-month billing cycles with complete billing information, authority spokeswoman Liesel Adam told me.

"Now that we are getting everyone back to a normal quarterly cycle, we hope customers will begin to be more comfortable with our process," she said. "In the meantime, their calls are welcomed, and we hope customers will be patient with us as we have been trying to address every concern and question in a timely and professional manner."

Allentown leased its water and sewer utilities to raise cash to bail out its severely underfunded pension system. Lehigh County Authority was the winning bidder, signing a deal to lease the utilities for 50 years at a cost of $211.3 million.

The authority assumed control of the water and sewer systems Aug. 8. Some of its first billings to customers didn't cover the normal three months of use. Some covered only two months. Others, like those for Mann and Goslawski, covered four months, so it makes sense that they would be higher.

They understood that after I explained what the authority had told me. But they wondered why the authority couldn't have just told them that. Both said they had called about their bills and didn't get such a concise answer.

"They failed to explain any of this on the phone," Goslawski told me. "The bill and so-called newsletter is far from a clear explanation. Their callous attitude toward my phone call has soured my view of the LCA and their customer service."

It wasn't clear on his bill, nor on Mann's, that they were being billed for four months because the date of their previous meter read was not on their bills.

Their bills referred them to an included newsletter for an explanation. The newsletter contained the answer, but it wasn't easy for everyone to decipher. All it told them was that the city had last read their meter in June or July, before leasing the systems to the authority. It mentioned their next bills would cover a full three months of use and would put them back on their normal schedule.

Including a simple statement that bills may be higher or lower than normal due to the billing cycles being off would have been clearer.

"I definitely would have preferred to list the actual meter reading dates on the customers' first bill from LCA," Adam said, "but this was not something we could accomplish due to the way the billing data transferred over to LCA."

She said the city provided the meter reading data to the authority, but because it was in a history file and wasn't current data, it couldn't be included on the bills. She said bills can display only data for meter readings taken after Aug. 8.

"All future bills will show the correct meter reading dates now that everyone is on a regular bill cycle," Adam said.

Mann and Goslawski weren't the only customers who questioned the accuracy of their first bills from the authority.

Adam told me the authority received "a lot of calls" last month because the bills that were sent in November and were due in December had an extra-long bill cycle.

She said last month the authority had received more than 2,000 phone calls from city customers since leasing the water and sewer systems, and about 90 percent of them were billing-related.